


Elegy For An Untold Botanist

by moustache_bonnet



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust - Philip Pullman
Genre: Academia, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Book: The Secret Commonwealth, Canon Compliant, Companion Piece, Dust (His Dark Materials), F/M, Headcanon, His Dark Materials Spoilers, Missing Scene, Swearing, The Book of Dust Spoilers, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:48:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27161369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moustache_bonnet/pseuds/moustache_bonnet
Summary: A three-part account on Roderick Hassall's life shortly before his journey into the depths of Karamakan desert and his motivations to sacrifice the thing most sacred.[For a better understanding of the story's context, knowledge ofThe Book of Dust, Volume Two: The Secret Commonwealthby Philip Pullman is required]
Relationships: Anthony Hassall/Original character
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	1. Contingency

**Author's Note:**

> _These roses and hot sunlight in early November  
>  decline responsibility for their schedule mortality,  
> leaving us with old sonnets and our own uncertain wrists._
> 
> \--J. W. Cullum; _Roses, Revisited, In A Paradoxical Autumn_

“Margaret Ashby, Oxford Times.”

“You have an appointment? We only take appointed visits today.”

“Oh! Um, of _course_ … I’m here to see Dr Brewster Napier.”

“Could you give me the last name again?”

“Ashby.”

“Please hold for a minute.”

Margaret never gave the porter a chance to check with the information. She swept past his window at the entrance to the Botanic Garden administration while he busied himself with a long list of names, which, as he would find out a second too late, didn't include her own.

She leapt over a flight of stairs, the sturdy leather case of a portable camera swinging dangerously at her side. She heard the porter cry out, “Miss!”, but by then she already reached the first floor, knowing she had but a few moments before he would have set out to look for her; and it wasn't hard to guess where she was headed: she just told him. _Oh, well._

Napier's laboratory was easy enough to locate even despite the complicated setup of the building's ground plan--she had the police tape to thank for that and a group of onlookers huddled together at the door. A general mood of consternation hung over the sparse crowd; eyes were wide, necks craned, some people went even as far as letting out a soft gasp or draping a hand over their mouths.

“I thought we were here for a burglary, not a _murder_ ,” said her amused dæmon, who had the form of a wood mouse. Margaret carried him inside the breast pocket of her shirt, where his yellow and brown body was hard to distinguish from her own hair and a worn camel coat that drooped over him.

“Don't be like that, Ira. It's the Department of _Plant Sciences_ , I'd imagine this is the first occasion of drama they had in years.”

The mouse chuckled and pulled himself up to his tip-toes.

Margaret reached for the camera and wound the film, then brought the device to her bespectacled face to take a shot of the hall. With all the counter-light coming from the windows at the end of it, the photogram itself won’t stand for much detail, but the darkened ambience of the scene sure underlined the mystery of the circumstance.

She slithered closer to the people.

“Poor old Brewster, this is the last thing he needs right now…” said one of the bystanders.

Another nodded. “And Margery, too. Have you heard? She’s transitioning to Cambridge because of the previous incident.”

Margaret joined in, in the same hushed manner, asking no-one in particular and with such ease in her tone as if she was among friends: “Do we know yet if anything had been taken?” 

“Who are you?” someone enquired.

“Margaret. I’m in Dr Napier’s class, at the university,” she said.

It was enough to fool an older lady with a stoic expression smoking a cigarillo, who shrugged and said, “Nah, I shouldn't think so, the lads locked most of their specimens away downstairs. Thank the Authority for that, He must've sent a premonition.”

Margaret rolled her eyes and, wondering what 'downstairs' meant or how she could get there later, walked to the side of the door. She pressed her cheek against the frame, head tilted just enough to see.

Inside the lab, a mayhem.

Disheveled desks, folders fallen over in their shelves, pulled out drawers stacked into towers that hovered unsteadily over a wooden floor further covered in paperwork. Among the research papers and letters on the ground lay scattered anatomy diagrams of various rose species, the scarlet painted flowers of which made it all look like a scene of a far more gruesome crime. The mess was excessive and unnecessary. It was apparent to Margaret that whoever searched the laboratory wasn't only thorough, but wanted to leave a clear indication of their past presence. It was a message.

Trio of men and a woman stood surrounded by the chaos, talking over one another while a policeman did his best to take their statement. One of the men Margaret recognized from a photogram she looked up prior to this visit, the sandy-haired one with what she thought to be a ridiculously rectangular frame--he was Dr Napier. The others must've been his colleagues.

Margaret made sure the viewfinder of the camera incorporated all of the room when she pushed the shutter button. The unmistakable clicking sound was enough to draw attention.

“Excuse me, the public are not allowed in here!” said the police officer and his dog-dæmon growled.

Margaret took a step inside. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I'm with the Oxford Times; we wondered if perhaps Dr Napier wanted to give a short press announcement about the break in and its possible motives?” Her words were frank, precise, and straight to the point. There was not a moment to be wasted.

The sudden presence of a stranger seemed to have an anbaric shock-like effect on Napier. He started to shake a little. “How are you here so quickly, who tipped you off?”

She didn't bother to reply, instead followed with another question of her own: “It's the second case of vandalism on the department's grounds within the same month, do you have any idea who could be behind it?”

“How did you get in here?” Napier said. He was becoming incoherent now; the woman at his side placed a hand on his shoulder.

“I can answer all your questions, Doctor, if you answer mine. Please, the public deserve to know more about the nature of these highly unusual offenses.”

Napier yelped, at loss of what to say or do. It was a cue to the authority in the room. The officer walked briskly up to Margaret and said:

“There is nothing unusual about it, Miss. Now, please, leave or I'll make you leave.”

“Charming,” she deadpanned and shuffled in the doorway. Ira buried himself into the pocket as the policeman reached out to touch her arm. “No, there's no need for that. I'm going.” She raised her voice. “If Dr Napier wants me to.”

In the background, the doctor gawked his already large eyes at her. At the same time, the porter caught up with her, huffing and flushed from running up the stairs:

“I am _so_ sorry, everyone, I never had a chance--”

“It's all right, Frank,” Napier interrupted him, choked-up. “The Miss is leaving anyway--you heard the Constable, there is nothing unusual to see here.”

Margaret paused. “Oh… Alright. But if you changed your mind, do come find me. The name's Ashby,” she pronounced carefully, “Oxford Times, remember.”

The Constable had her cleared out of the room and the hall with the porter's help right afterwards, and not more than ten minutes after her arrival Margaret landed at the bottom of the stairs leading from the building's main gate straight down into the garden's Medicinal Plants Collection. She screwed up her eyes in the sun. The flower bed patches in the yellowing lawn were still green as April has been cold and unusually dry so far, but an occasional blotch of purple or white came through here and there, and a fragrance filled the air from the perennial herbs which were arranged in generous, recently cut bushes.

“That went well,” she quipped.

“Not really,” Ira concurred, reappearing into the light of the day.

“Well, at least we've got the photos--”

“Miss Ashby!” came a voice.

Confusedly Margaret looked about until she found a dark-haired head poking out of an open window, coincidentally one on the very room out of which she had just been escorted. Was he one of the colleagues? She reached her hand up to shield away the sun and squinted. She couldn't tell.

“Yes?”

“Would you wait there for a second?”

“Alright!” she said.

As she exchanged an expectant look with Ira, out came a man of about her own age, not more than forty; tall, not too broad. He had a moustache and a thick stubble, and was dressed in a dark blue woolen sweater badly frayed at the cuffs and a lab coat. On his left shoulder his dæmon clamped at the white garment, a pretty hawk of pale feathers, quite small in comparison to others that Margaret had seen, though her form was enough for Ira to stiffen at the sight of her. The man introduced himself as Dr Anthony Hassall, a colleague of Dr Napier's.

“Thank you for sparing a minute. I wanted to apologize for how Brewster treated you, he's a good fellow, just awfully startled by the event,” he said in a coarse londonian accent. 

Margaret grinned politely against the sharp sun, which endowed the man's tawny brown skin with a stunning golden hue. “That's all right, I don't mind. I understand he has to deal with his own matters first. D'you think I can expect his visit anytime soon?"

“I don't think you should expect any visit at all, Miss. And I must agree that you shouldn't waste your time on this story, there really is nothing of interest to pursue.”

Margaret folded her arms across her chest; a slight crease formed in the middle of her brow. “Only I don't think that's true, Dr Hassall.”

“No?”

“No, quite the opposite.”

“And why would that be?”

“Because I've not been here fifteen minutes and three people already tried to convince me of how uninteresting the whole thing is. Except from my own experience every time a crime is committed, however uneventful, the people stand _lines_ to share their aggravation and hardships. Not here though. A little strange, don't you think?”

He gave her a stiff smile, struggling with an appropriate reaction. “An exception that proves the rule. We're Scholars, Miss, we don't usually trouble ourselves with these kinds of things,” came out of him.

“Snobbish, but diplomatic,” Margaret acknowledged. “However, your friend Napier seemed quite troubled to _me_ and you said it yourself just now, how _awfully_ startled he was by the event.”

Hassall stopped mid-breath. “Well, nothing gets past you, I see.”

“I'm afraid not,” she said, then decided to pounce before he had a chance to think of a better answer:

“Does it have anything to do with Napier’s article on the Rusakov particles in _Proceedings of the Microscopical Institute of Leiden_?”

Hassall’s eyes were dark but clear and Margaret could distinctly see how his pupils dilated. He swallowed air; his dæmon let out a shriek of anguish.

“Where did you hear about this?” he said.

“I'd read it. Rusakov's theory is my personal quirk, see, and I've got very resourceful friends at the university. It was interesting. Quite revolutionary, in fact.”

He blew his cheeks. He didn't seem panicked, but his gaze wandered as he was giving the situation a thought. Then, his dæmon whispered something to him and he asked:

“Are you really with the press?”

Margaret reached inside her coat to pull out her press pass. “You're scared.”

“Wouldn't you be?” he said as he gave the identification a once-over. He inspected the features of her face and the mouse-dæmon on her breast, which for a moment made Margaret dreadfully self-conscious. He then folded the pass and returned it. “We can't talk here.”

He started for the door, presumably to invite her into his office, but then he must've thought better of it and instead beckoned her with an extended hand a little further up the garden, to a bench which was hidden from view by robust greenery.

 _He doesn't want to be seen with me_ , she thought.

“If you'd read Brewster's article, you must understand how important it is to keep quiet about the matter,” he said once they were seated.

“On the contrary. If Dr Napier's lab had been broken into in regard to his work, it is critical the people hear about it. Publicity is the most reliable form of security right after scholastic sanctuary.”

Hassall's scoff grew into a rugged laugh, and the laugh into an entrancing smile. “I don't want to diminish the importance of your work, but the security you speak of is an illusion. It's an abstract concept, a social arrangement. I mean, look at how adequately these means protected Rusakov himself, or Grumman, or anyone in this field really, the list of names is endless. It doesn't mean a thing to these people.”

“These people--so you _do_ know who did it,” Margaret said and the flush of animosity she provoked in Hassall manifested into a nervous beat of his dæmon's wings. She continued with a little more care:

“Dr Hassall, if the Magisterium--and we are talking about the Magisterium here, let's not be shy about that--is _really_ behind this, don't you think people deserve to know? It could create a much needed momentum.”

“A momentum for what? Do you want to use our story to start a public disobedience?” he cackled and she blushed.

“What I _want_ is to try to make people see the truth. Look, Dr Napier's discovery is world-changing and clearly the Church started to take their measures against it already. And if they have the arrogance and indignity to destroy people's entire livelihoods, like they did by burning those rose gardens in Asia, and by threatening Dr Napier so blatantly, God knows how far they could go to further distort the reality of our world.”

What she said left the man utterly flabbergasted, though Margaret could've sworn she also caught a hint of appreciation under the surface.

“Those or some wild connections, Miss Ashby,” he said, voice stone-cold.

“Are they? The media are suffocated by several independent news centering around rose oil. It doesn't take a genius to connect them, now does it.”

He ran a hand over his face--it was calloused and the tips of his fingers were darkened by lingering dirt, Margaret noticed. He was quiet for a moment. “You didn't come here to write a report on a burglary, did you?”

“I was hoping for a bigger feature on the rose business if Napier provided enough detail,” she admitted.

Hassall pressed his back into the wooden rest. His fingers fidgeted with the hem of the sweater and his heel played a staccato against the gravel underneath their feet. He was very agitated by the look of it. Margaret wondered if she should have held her cards close a little longer.

He gave her a small surprise when he breathed, “Alright,” and then spoke to her: 

“Well, since you seem to know the context so well, I'll be open with you, Miss. Our department is setting up a research station in the East to further investigate the roses from which the oil originates, with the particular optical effect, but that would be impossible if the authorities knew about some aspects of our work, otherwise the place would certainly meet an end similar to the rose gardens. Brewster is at the edge of his nerve on account of all this--we all are, but he suffers the most because he feels like dragging us all into it: myself, my partner Dr Strauss, and Dr Stevenson. I would be most unhappy if you added to his burden with this article. I agree that the people deserve to know the truth, hell, they deserve _progress_ above all, it just isn't the right time for our story to be told.”

All the time Hassall maintained a very intense eye-contact for which Margaret hated him: he put every piece of himself into the plea, to a point where she could see his whole heart through his eyes. Ira got so curious about the man that he left the safety of the pocket and climbed to her shoulder.

Margaret rubbed at her temple, then pushed her spectacles higher up the bridge of her nose. 

“Please, Miss Ashby--”

“It's Margaret.”

“Margaret--,” a brief smile as he said this,“--hold the story. There will come the right time for each of us to say what we have to say, but you must give me a chance to explore my own account, first.”

Now in turn she found her knee to be jerking with nerves. She looked down to Ira even though she knew she wouldn't get much support from him--her dæmon's heart was even softer than hers.

“Godammit… Alright, but I'll have the exclusive once that time _is_ right,” she said.

“I _promise_ you that.”

Margaret offered her hand and Hassall enveloped it in his own. They sealed the deal with a handshake

“But what am I supposed to write about now?” she laughed, the question more or less rhetoric as her desk drowned under stories to be said, from all around Oxford.

Hassall leaned in a little and with an openly feigned indifference said, “Well, I could tell you about a _very_ exciting genus of _osteospermum_ we have cultivated for the Taxonomic Beds section of the Walled Gardens, if you'd like. At least I get to keep my eye on you now that you know my secret.” It was a very impertinent proposal from a man who not a minute ago appeared on the verge of tears.

For some reason, Margaret fell for it on the spot. “Yes, I would like that very much.”


	2. Recognition

He asked her after she spent the night at his for the first time:

“Would you like to see it?”

Margaret raised her head from where she lay resting on his stomach and with her chin gave him an unintended jab under the ribs, eyes wide with eagerness, though she didn't at first understand what he could have meant.

“Tony?” she said. She always called him by his first name, never by his third--Roderick or Rod as everyone else did. It annoyed him at first (“Only my father calls me Anthony.” - “Well, I don't call you _Anthony_ , now do I!”) and she did it to tease him. Then, somehow, they had grown accustomed to it, perhaps as they struggled so hard to dissociate from who they both were outside this relation.

“The microscope lens. Would you like to see it, see through it?”

She pushed herself to her elbows and Ira, too, cocked his head up from under the loose strands of hair on the top of her head. He screwed his rosy snout about this way and that as if trying to sniff out anything that might be fishy about the unexpected proposition. Anthony laughed.

“Would that be possible? Even after all this time?” Margaret said and sat up. Where her features were softened and flushed not a moment before, was now but a sharp expression of trained interest.

“Yes. The oil hardened into a kind of laqueur, but it preserved its properties. Brewster occasionally works with the objective. So, would you?”

“Would he let us?”

“I shouldn't think so.”

“Then why would you even ask?” she scolded.

Anthony smiled a wicked smile and buried his fingers into her hair right behind the ear, his thumb brushing her cheek lightly and then pressing against the corner of her mouth. She had to resist an urge to swallow it whole and bite on it; the ideas washing over her when he had her attention under control like that were worrying at best.

“Darling, what Napier doesn't know won't hurt him and I _do_ have the key to his lab,” he said.

“Now you're just showing off to tease me,” Margaret said with a light hint of laughter in her tone.

He sprung from the sheets to his feet and reached for a leftover glass of wine on the bed stand only to drain it in one blameworthy gulp. Then, Anthony started to dress. She watched his movements with a flustered gaze, starved for his warmth more than curious about the sudden activity. Her eyes followed his hands closely as he pulled up a pair of shorts. She bit her lip, impudent.

“You're coming, then?” he declared, now finishing up the buttons on a soiled shirt.

Margaret scowled. “What, now?”

“It's the perfect time.”

“It's the middle of the night,” she said and lifted up the covers to shroud her nakedness in a sudden gesture of defiance. She looked over to Strella, who sat on the headboard of the bed. The hawk gave a brief look of contempt not meant towards anybody in particular, and shuffled her wings in a shrug.

“Oh, come now Mags, don't you want to see it?” Anthony insisted.

Margaret scoffed and forced out a dry laugh. She rubbed her eyes; said, “You're much more work than I would’ve imagined, Dr Hassall.”

Napier's freshly refurbished laboratory at the Botanic Garden was a very different setting to the homely disorder of Anthony's college flat. The anbaric lamps mounted on the ceiling encompassed the wooden and steel surfaces of the desks and work counters in a sickly blue hue, and made the microscopy equipment cast long, eerie shadows. Everything was still and sterile, and Margaret in her disheveled evening dress and espadrilles damp from dew that she caught as they ran through the Fellows' Garden felt out of place. Her dӕmon clung to the hair draped over her bare shoulder, swelling with anticipation.

“You think we're really going to see it, Dust?” Ira said. 

She growled an incomprehensible reply.

“Could I try to get under the microscope, you reckon, so you could see me?”

“Don't be daft, Ira, microscopes aren't built to observe _whole_ mice.”

While they bickered, Anthony walked out of the adjusting repository room with Strella on his shoulder and a wooden casket in his hands; a small square box like the ones in which the microscope objectives would be sold originally, unlabelled. He set the box down upon one of the desks. By the family photograms that adorned it, it belonged to Napier: his black-and-white gaze judged them silently, even frozen in time like that.

“Are you sure this is all right?” Margaret huffed.

Anthony looked up, puzzled.

“I don’t mean because we’re trespassing, but Brewster would have a heart-attack if he knew you were showing this to someone like me.”

“I’m only gonna show you what he’d already published himself. It’s okay, Mags, he uses it with his students all the time. He won’t know, I promise.”

She acknowledged this with a nod.

“Now, we could look at different specimens,” Anthony said as he opened the casket and gently unfolded a piece of fabric in which the objective was wrapped, “But I want you to see something extra tonight.”

He brought the objective to one of the research stations and mounted it with utmost care onto a microscope. Margaret followed. He surprised her by pulling one of her hairs.

“Hey!”

“Now do the same with Ira, please,” he instructed and then placed both pieces of provided material under the lens. “The particles are most densely concentrated around people and their dӕmons,” he said and sat into the swivel chair that was parked behind the counter. “Take a look.”

Margaret inhaled and exhaled; removed her spectacles. Her fingers trembled when she touched the eyepiece and looked into it.

Her gasp filled the room with a faint echo.

She was looking at two tube-like shapes, textured, taupe and deep brown, as she expected--those were the hairs--but they were each surrounded by a clear flare, sort of a spangled light of white and gold and every possible colour of the visible spectrum all at once. It reminded her a little of the effect of looking into a light-source through fogged spectacles.

What really made her blood rush was the connection of these individual halos, veins of trickling particles, very fine but distinguishable. They throbbed in the rhythm of her and Ira's heartbeat and flowed like a ravenous river in a purposeful current. What she was seeing there, was visible evidence of the bond between a person and their dӕmon, it had to be. A palpable manifestation of the strings that pulled at each being so painfully when their half moved beyond them. Dozens of them, even in between what was essentially dying matter.

For a beat she became very conscious of Ira's touch, of his weight and the shape of his body against her own. The dӕmon’s every sense was heightened and sensitized also, and his perception of the moment was so deep that she felt the warmth that he felt at the tips of her fingers, and smelled her own skin as he smelled it, the residue of tanning lotion, perfume, and saliva. There was something carnal about this highly forbidden experience that she couldn’t explain and it filled her with a thrill which even in the years to come she would find impossible to compare.

Margaret tightened her grip on the eyepiece. The specks of light danced around the hairs for a little longer, but after a while the colored fringe lost its clarity and the particles scattered gradually back out into the world.

She pulled away from the microscope with an indefinite feeling.

“Well?” Anthony inquired.

“I'm--,” she said, but ultimately she just stood there, mouth gaping silently, eyes set into the distance.

Anthony gave her a minute to readjust, then went on, “It's beautiful, innit? And tragic at the same time, knowing there are people in this world who willingly deprive themselves of such things.”

“And others, against their will. It's… Impious.” The use of the word was unfortunate, but she couldn't find another that would fit the severity of the fact as well. What else was it, if not denying the existence of something bigger and more important than humanity?

“Imagine what we could learn through other devices equipped with lenses like these! Spectrometers, telescopes! Even with a pair of bloody specs you could see so much of what has been eluding us for centuries,” Margaret rambled on as she placed her own pair back on the top of her nose.

Her _naïveté_ brought a playful spark into Anthony's eye. “Yes. But first we would need more oil, and to say it is almost _impossible_ to acquire is an understatement.”

“That's why you and Strauss are so set out to find a way to cultivate the roses, to have enough oil for distribution and research purposes?”

“Yeah, atop of other things.”

“Is there really no way of replicating the effects with a different kind of rose oil, or a different plant oil altogether?” Margaret said.

“We tried and so far it seems there isn't.”

“So, what makes the Tajik roses so special?”

“That's what we're trying to find out. Our attempts on growing the roses in a controlled environment have failed repeatedly so we are sure it has to be something specific to their natural region, but we don't know what just yet. Is it the climate, the soil, the technique of cultivation? That's why observation _in situ_ is so vital.”

As Anthony said this, the reality of life downed back on her. She came off her high at once, distracted by a recurring idea of loneliness. “God, I can't believe you're leaving for _four_ months for Central fucking Asia,” she moaned.

He laughed and pulled her into his lap--disturbed by the abrupt motion Strella flapped to the edge of the counter, shrieking at them in anger. The swivel chair moved back and creaked under their combined weight. “It's important,” he said.

“If I hadn’t known that before, I sure as hell do now,” Margaret affirmed with a touch of sarcasm and raked her fingers through his close-cut hair.

Even away in thought about his upcoming journey Anthony kept gazing hungrily at her mouth and in her current state, like a light drunkenness, she considered it infuriating. She licked his upper lip; he kissed her hard. Ira squealed as the man's hand skimmed over his back in an accidental touch, but not in displeasure--he was getting more and more used to it now.

“I can't wait,” Anthony said after their mouths parted and with such fervor that Margaret couldn't scold him for abandoning her if she wanted to. “Mother told me stories about Tashbulak and the Karamakan desert when I was a kid. The Punjabis have at least half a dozen legends about it, brought by the Kashmiri merchants and traders traveling the Silk Road.”

“Legends? What legends?”

“Voices drifting across the sand, spirits luring caravans from the edges of the desert into its depth, cities swept by moving rivers...” He spoke in a whisper and dramatically to make her laugh, but it only gave Margaret shivers in all the right places.

But then he dropped the act and said in all seriousness, “Some say you cannot enter Karamakan together with your dӕmon.”

“Rod, please don't, not now,” Strella begged.

All of a sudden there was a sadness behind Anthony’s eyes which Margaret didn't see there before. The hawk-dӕmon started to fuss, wanting badly to be close to her person but not daring to come between him and the woman just yet.

“Then how can you go there, without them? You can't do that,” Margaret continued the conversation even though she sensed something to be amiss.

“You need to _separate_ ,” Anthony said. The word was like a cold fist to her stomach. “It's a place like the one in Siberia, where witches go to be able to do it.”

“And you believe this?” She grimaced at him, her emotion indifferent as part of her still believed they were speaking hypothetically about the matter. 

Silence. Then after a while he admitted:

“I know it for a fact. Strauss found a guide, a local camel-herder who experienced it; a ghost of a man, Strauss says. He _is_ able to separate from his dӕmon.”

“That's…” Margaret started but didn't bother to finish.

Anthony bobbed his head slightly. “Yeah.”

His eyes were lowered, the corners of his mouth dropped. His dӕmon was sick with a want to be with him. All the fun had gone out of them, dissipated into thin air, just like the particles under the lens. The urgency in their expression was unmistakable. 

“Ah.” Upon a sudden realisation, Margaret pushed herself up from his knees and stood up. Anthony watched her. Strella didn't miss a second to get to him.

“So that's why you brought me here _tonight_ ,” Margaret said.

“What do you mean?”

“Tony, don’t make me an idiot--are you planning on going into the desert?”

He averted his gaze again and sighed. But it wasn't the kind of a sound she would assume from him: one of shame that he had been found out. Instead, it was a respiration of relief and Margaret suspected he planned this all along, for her to start this conversation instead of him.

“I don’t know… It is said among the locals that there's a place, a garden or a facility of some kind, where one of the rose species is being cultivated, it has grown there for centuries and it’s the one the oil of which the Tajik shamans use. We're only speculating about going there yet, nothing is set. Strauss is apprehensive, I even more so. I dunno, I thought that maybe if you'd seen for yourself what's at stake, you'd--”

“What, would work you up a bit about how important it was? That I would give you a reason to go?” Margaret said and Anthony nodded again in response. “Do you really think I'm that heartless?” Her voice came out shrill.

“What? No!” Anthony jumped from the chair to grab at her shoulders with a certain insistence. “No, not heartless. Determined. You’re _determined_ to go beyond the limits to find the truth. It's something I envied you from the moment I met you. You’re so certain in your vocation, and standing before a decision like this I wish I was, too.”

Pity for the man rushed through Margaret, also pride, love, maybe shame, but her limbs were too hardened by the sudden embitterment. She felt dizzy. As a result, her next words were supportive in meaning, but harsh in tone, “You’re mistaken if you think you don’t have the determination, Tony. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t start with the research in the first place--you knew what you were in for. It doesn’t mean that your life isn’t imminently endangered that you’re not being brave. You and Strauss have decided to go to the edge of the world to find what’s it worth for.”

It seemed to have a somewhat encouraging effect on him. He jutted his chin. Margaret continued:

“And while I’m flattered, I’m not the one you should be asking permission from, to go into the cursed bloody desert, if anything about it is true.”

Anthony turned his head to Strella, who trembled and wailed. It was apparent that even as little as an idea of the journey paralyzed her with fear. She pressed against him and he held onto her, and kissed her, and buried his face into her feathers, nuzzling at them with his nose.

"Mags… if I decided to go, If we'd--would you still be here, waiting for me?" the poor, miserable man asked out of nowhere.

Margaret picked up on the gaze he fixed her with. There were tears pooling in the corners of his eyes, she could see.

“Well,” she started. She closed the distance between them and held onto him like he held onto his dӕmon, to stop herself from coming undone completely at the sight of him.

She never experienced anything like this before. First, this man showed her the unimaginable beauty of the bond between a person and their soul, and then in turn he told her he would try and destroy it for a cause greater than himself. It was hard to distinguish between the pride and the resentment that was building up inside her.

“As it turns out, Dr Hassall, I like you very much, even though you're clearly out of your mind,” she said eventually and he let out a choked-up giggle. “Yes, I'll wait for you. I'd wait for you anytime.”


	3. Remonstration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _I shall run through the shadow,  
>  sleeping, sleeping, to see  
> if I can come where you are  
> who died, and I did not know._  
>   
>  _Wait, wait; do not run;  
>  wait for me in the still water  
> by the lily that the moon  
> makes out of light; with the water  
> that drops the infinite  
> into your white hands!_  
>  __  
> \--Jiménez Juan Ramón, _Wait For Me In The Still Water_

When Margaret came home from the office that August evening, she found the door on her house to be closed but unlocked.

She paused with the key latched inside the keyhole, while the fingers of her other hand coiled tighter around the neck of a wine bottle which she carried and eventually intended to enjoy alone, by candlelight and John Keats' _Collected Poems_ , in what should be an _empty_ lodging. Her housemates were out of town for the week, after all.

“Could've Jen returned earlier from London?” Ira guessed and peered out of the pocket of her cardigan, but he was wary also, ears moving around his head like minuscule satellites.

“Could be,” Margaret admitted and turned the key again.

“Jenny? Girls, are you home?” she called out as she dropped off her things by the door. The hall was lit, but all the other keys and boots were missing from their accustomed places, which would indicate the presence of either Jen, or Carla, or Mary. Margaret slipped out of her shoes and intently shifted her grip on the bottle so that it could be swung like a truncheon.

“Hello?” she said but no answer came.

She stepped into a modest shared salon, darkened by drawn curtains save for a soft reddish light of a night lamp that someone had moved from the stand by the sofa to illuminate the dinner table at the far right corner of the room. This was fully set with a meal, a takeout arranged on porcelain plates from the kitchen, and a flower piece of white lilacs placed into a beer jug in lieu of a vase. The flowers were wilting over the edges of the jug, abundantly spotted with browning petals as they were of the year's final bloom--the last messengers of another summer coming to an end.

Beside the piece was positioned a tea-set of two unmatching cups and an antique silver pot--Margaret guessed the content of it by the sweet-smelling mist curling from the spout: a freshly brewed _chai masala_. The notion immediately put her and Ira's mind at ease for it revealed who was the intruder in their home. She put the bottle down and turned. 

Her eyes found him sitting motionless and disguised by shadows at the other side of the room, behind her own writing desk. The hawk-dӕmon loomed on his shoulder with her wings spread out around his head, distorting his familiar silhouette. It added a slight bloodcurdling effect to their appearance.

“Tony! Authority, you scared the living daylight out of me!” Margaret cried. “What are you doing here--weren't you supposed to be at the college, packing?”

He said raspily, “I'd already finished with that, so I thought I'd surprise you with dinner. Thought we could spend my last night in England together…”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Margaret said. She flicked a switch by the door--he sounded off and she needed to see him in the face to make judgement.

When the naked yellow light bulb hanging from the ceiling stuttered on, she noticed that she wasn't wrong though. He looked aggravated; tense around the jaw.

“Yeah, Mags, there's a huge fuckin' ‘but’ coming.”

He _was_ aggravated, then. Only when he was really angry would his Cockney origins show through the layers of his otherwise meticulous scholarly diction like this. He stood up and across the desktop moved a fat bundle of papers, so that she could see and understand without him needing to word his concern.

It was the manuscript of the feature on rose oil.

“Shit,” Ira peeped intelligibly enough for Anthony to hear. The man scoffed.

Margaret rubbed at her eyes under her spectacles, leaving smudged fingerprints on the lenses. The sickening feeling of anxiety unfurled within her chest. “Where did you find it?” She asked as if there were multiple answers to her question, and felt stupid for it.

“The fish bloody market, where d’you think? In your desk, that’s where.”

“You were going through my things?” Margaret bristled.

He gave her a look like he couldn’t believe her. “No, I hadn’t been going through your things, I was looking for a pen and paper to leave you an address where you can reach me when I'll be thirteen hundred fuckin' miles away in goddamn Tashbulak!” Halfway through the sentence his voice has risen a good measure. He was now openly, and loudly, reprimanding her: “You said you wouldn't write it!”

Like a wave, the nerves have fallen and flattened inside Margaret, to be followed by the rising waters of irritation. “Alright, hold on a second there. I never said I wouldn't write it. I said I'll _hold_ , there's a difference. _You_ said that time will come for both of us to say what we wanted--”

“So you thought you'll prepare ahead?”

“Well, no, it's just how I work! I can't not be writing when I'm researching a topic, else I forget everything I was going to say. That's all! That's all that is to it, there was no ill intent.”

“Researching, were you?”

“Yes!” she said eagerly, in an illusion that this was the reaction he had been looking for. Wrong; it only provoked him more:

“Bloody hell, Margaret! Everything you used in the text are the things I told you in confidence, as to my partner!” He paused, then lashed out in a way she would never expect of him: “Or am I just that to you, a source? One that you can conveniently fuck when in the mood?”

“What? No! Our relationship has nothing to do with it. How can you even say that?”

“Because I was under the impression that we were telling each other things! I shared everything with you.” He tapped his fingers vigorously on the manuscript. “So why have you kept this from me, hidden inside your desk like it was some state secret?”

“It's not finished. No-one was supposed to see it before publication, before you and Strauss have authorized it, so I hid it here so that nobody would find it, especially nobody from the press office.”

Anthony let out a short sarcastic laugh. He spread his arms wide in an instinctive, although needlessly theatrical, gesture to indicate his presence, and Strella mimicked him. He said, “But I _did_ find it!” 

“But you practically live here!” Margaret countered. 

“As do you three flatmates, Mags. And what about all the social calls you entertain? This place is more frequented than the fuckin' Trout! What if anybody stumbled upon it like I did, huh? How can you know they wouldn't take it to the Office of Right Duty, or worse, to the CCD?”

“They wouldn't.” 

“ _How_ can you know that?!” His voice was sharp and piping, not unlike the sound of his dӕmon's call.

“I told her not to write it,” Ira weighed in, who clawed his way up Margaret’s sleeve and now sat atop her head. She wished that he didn't, for he was too exposed and Strella too swift, and would she put her mind to it, she could sweep him from there like a speck of dirt. 

Anthony's dark pupils moved up, glistening and blazing with the golden light of the bulb as if on fire. “So what, Ira? If that was supposed to tell me that she at least possesses _some_ inhibitors, then that's poor shittin' evidence, because if you asked her and I asked her, and she did it anyway, it proves the exact opposite!”

“I never intended on publishing it without your approval,” Margaret recited, chopping up the sentence into separate words, which perhaps made it sound too condescending.

He looked away, but the way Strella glared at her: wide-eyed and with the mandibles of her bill parted in a muted scream, it was clear to Margaret how disappointed Anthony was. When he finally turned his face back, he had a frown on and his mouth protruded into a slight pout as he pressed his lips together.

“I wish you understood that you never had an approval to write it down in the first place,” he said and then started for the door.

Margaret panicked. Ira scratched at her scalp. “No, you can't leave in the middle of a conversation that we won't be able to finish any time soon.”

Anthony stopped in front of her. He squeezed her shoulders--not like a lover would, but the mere fact that he didn't find her closeness repulsive relieved her a little. She didn't know what to do or where to look now he was so close; she was so angry with him for making such a fuss about this, or maybe with herself for not being able to see his point of view.

“I don't like how this evening turned out either, but we need to put it to bed for now. Until I return. I have to go home now, pack, prepare things for the journey. We're leaving really early tomorrow as you know.”

She stared at his mouth, daring not to recognize the contempt behind his eyes. “I thought you were already packed.”

“I forget nothing ever gets past you.”

As he said this, a displaced memory burned a hole into Margaret’s middle.

“At least promise me we will sort this out when you're back, at all costs. I said I'll wait for you and I meant it,” she said.

“Promise.” Anthony patted her on the shoulders once more like she was some wretched, pitiful stray dog begging to be loved. He walked into the hall. She trailed behind him.

“And that you will return whole,” she added.

He stopped dead in his tracks with his hand on the doorknob and his back turned. Strella shuddered and cooed. It broke Margaret’s heart how long he waited before he said, “… I promise.”

The last thing she remembered of him was the blue woollen sweater vanishing behind the corner of the street and the scent of lilac and _karha_ , and a long, dark night, the damning loneliness of which she was about to experience once more, not too long after.

The next day, she burned the manuscript for him.

And then, she waited.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading, hope you enjoyed the story (even though it's a cruel, angsty one, haha)! I would love to hear from you, so don't hesitate to leave a comment.


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